This game will be one of wide interest and discussion. Texas last year won the championship of the Southwestern conference, and has always had a representative team. This year Coach Littlefield is optimistic, and he is very enthusiastic about the Harvard game in 1931. The game will be played early in the season, and if Texas has favorable material and average luck, Coach Littlefield sees no reason why Texas should not have an equal chance of victory.
Mr. Fisher, who has been instrumental in arranging this game, is highly pleased at the success of the project. He says that Harvard alumni generally, and especially those in Texas, will enthusiastically approve of this game. "What we particularly desire," said Mr. Fisher, "is a closer contact between Harvard and the Southwest, and we took this football game as a short-cut to our goal. You know, two strange business men can get closer together in an afternoon of golf than they might in weeks of correspondence, phone calls, or even business visits. It is the same in inter-university matters, and we indulge the hope that this football game will quickly engender an intersectional fraternalism between Harvard and the Southwest which could not be brought about by formalism and purely academic interchanges and contacts. Harvard has an ambition to be more than the provincial New England college that she used to be; she desires to serve in educational matters as a truly national university. To that end, she in 1925 frankly undertook to attract more promising material from the South and West. Admission had always been by special examinations, which were very difficult for graduates of even the best Western schools; but in 1925 Harvard rules to accept, without examination, from states South of the Ohio river and west of the Mississippi, boys who rank in the top one-seventh of the graduating class of a regularly organized and affiliated high school. This new ruling and this open-handed welcome to the boys of the South and West has resulted in greatly increased representation from these sections, and these new boys are ranking high in their classes. The new arrangement and other evidence of friendly interest are gradually breaking down the feeling that the Eastern institutions are 'offish', complacent, and super-conservative in their attitude.
"As to the game itself," said Mr. Fisher, "I have frankly told Bill Bingham, the Harvard director of athletics, that if Texas has a good team in 1931, the game will be no set-up, but a real contest. He realizes that this is true, especially if Texas 'points' for the game. As to the game and the final score, I just hope the better team will win on merit, not on flukes or fumbles. The possibility of the score doesn't interest me so much as the fact of the game itself. What pleases me is that Harvard, the oldest American university, has reached out over 2,000 miles from the Northeast and extended the glad hand of friendship to Texas, the oldest and largest university in the Southwest, and has said with a smile. 'Come let's be friends; come and have a game with us.' This is the first time, to my knowledge, that any one of the so-called 'Big-Four' of the East have invited a Southwestern team to play football' and I am glad that Harvard is the first host on such an occasion, and that a Texas team is the first guest." Dallas Daily Times.
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